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Talk:Braver
Braver is a balanced and enriching addition to my PSO2 experience! Not really. Braver is cancer and it has killed Phantasy Star Online 2. First off, allow me to say that I understand the desire to add more classes and increase variation in the game, but Braver has done just the opposite. Due to the use of both katana and bows, bravers basically do everything, and so team composition is completely unimportant now, and more than seventy-five percent of players I see play this one class, leaving a scarce twenty five percent of players to split between the other six. "What did braver do?", you may ask. What braver did is quite simple. It merely does everything to absurdity, obviating the need for any other class. *Hunter is geared for a tanky player, and their main job involves keeping attention. Braver does too much damage for hunter to perform this job, even with maximum War Cry. Wire lance hunters are also irrelevent because braver has stronger and wider area of effect abilities that keep everything out of the way. *Fighter is made to be fast, powerful, and maneuverable. Braver is faster and stronger than daggers and fists, and with katana combat, are more maneuverable than daggers in many situations. *Ranger is meant for hitting weak spots for heavy damage and running crowd control if they have a launcher. Braver's bow far exceeds a ranger's piercing shell's range and damage, and, once again, Braver has bigger and stronger crowd control than a launcher. *Gunner was the only class that remained relevent, as a properly-built and sufficiently skilled gunner could almost keep up with a braver's damage. However, in my last attempt to play, I found that all of the invulnerability frames of the gunner's flip were removed, making it totally useless due to low defensive stats, and braver is just as powerful as ever. *Force is primarily crowd control due to the variety of area of effect spells, but once again, the braver has bigger and stronger abilities than all but the strongest of techniques. *Techer is geared largely toward buffs, but braver has multiple unconditional buffs in its skill tree, thus rendering techers unneccesary. Consequences? Yeah, got a whole list of them. Since braver's introduction, finding a decent team has been almost impossible, because everyone seemed to be quite content to just whack things with their katana. All other classes have weaknesses. Hunter is limited to melee range and so flying targets give them dificulty, and fighter sacrifices damage in order to cover for these aerial enemies. Ranger is not a particularly high-damage class except when using weak spots, and so must be supplimented with other classes more capable of damage. Gunner, while powerful, has no crowd-control capabilities outside of a narrow cone, and has extremely low defense. Force... It's force, I think that one goes without much saying. These classes cover for one another's weaknesses, and, though it is possible to roll solo with any of them, it's this co-operation that makes the game interesting. Otherwise, there is no point to having a class system. Unlike all the other classes, though, braver has no pronounced weakness, being able to hit things at range or in person, having much stronger area of effect abilities than anyone else from both katana and bows, relatively high defense, high speed, high maneuverability, damage through the roof, etc. Braver is quickly becoming the only class, and rather than nerfing it, they merely make it even stronger by comparison, adding new and stronger abilities each time new weapon techs are added. Because of this, the game has become uninteresting due to a lack of variation. In the past, you could find all sorts of players and try out different strategies, but now it has devolved to "I'm going to do everything because braver". The only team dynamics remaining is whether you want to shoot things for massive damage or use a katana for massive damage. No variation and no team dynamics has removed any incentive to play this game. This is not Phantasy Star Online. It is a corroded shell of what once was. Episode 3's Changes Fortunately for Phantasy Star Online 2 in Japan, Sega at least really looked over all the classes and corrected the balancing issue with Gunner and Braver being much too common due to their strength. All of the skill trees are modelled similarly after Braver's skill tree, since all the others eventually became this jumbled mess of investing lots of wasted points into skills to get the one skill you wanted. Hunter and Fighter's Photon Arts and normal attacks got a damage increase and an overall speed increase, Hunter's Fury Stance is now leaned more towards S-ATK than R-ATK, along with Fighter recieving more skills that increase damage conditionally. All stances now last for 1800 seconds (30 minutes) and have a 5 second cooldown, enabling easier use for say Fighter to switch between stances with ease. Ranger's tools skills have also been revised, no longer requiring to purchase a specific item to be able to use the skill, along with a couple of Photon Art changes (mostly towards Launcher.) Gunner got minimal difference in terms of the update, only a few set of Photon Arts got buffed, S-Roll JA Bonus got nerfed from a 2.0 damage bonus to 1.1, though Chain has more functionality within the Gunner class, Showtime got a few good revisions, and Perfect Keeper isn't so strict with its 100% HP for damage bonus condition any more. Techniques (aside from Il Barta, Il Grants, and Il Megid) largely got buffed, resulting in Force prioritizing with a burst damage rate with its low HP and defenses, and Photon Flare offers no HP penalty any more. Techer's Wand gear has been revised so the damage from element explosions is no longer neglible, and it now supports Just Attack damage bonuses for it. Techer got a bunch of various skills for boosting buff effects, from even more Shifta effectiveness to Deband offering a temporary Max HP increase with its effect. Braver's Katana was largely ignored since it was already powerful enough, keeping a steady pace with the other classes. Bow was largely kept in place too to be more in place with Ranger and Gunner, and with the addition of the Chase Arrow PA, it makes the Bow even better for handling large targets such as bosses. Bouncer offers small damage per attack, but high DPS with both Dual Blades and Jet Boots. Its skills offer boosts to critical rate to everyone around the player, and offer specific skills towards its weapon (similar to Rapid Shoot for Bow.) Bouncer is one of the best crowd controlling classes in the game now, though I feel Dual Blades should be a little weaker against bosses to at least keep it in line with the other weaponry better. Nevertheless, the class system offers better, balanced diversity. It's definitely a great step up over Episode 2's poor class balancing. AlexiaTeal (talk) 16:29, June 30, 2015 (UTC)